Progress report

Chapter 2 of Razorback is being knocked into shape at the moment.  It's coming together, although by no means finished - the main concern is that it needs to be consistent with the new plotline that I've grafted on to the story.  I'm already thinking ahead to illustrating the thing, however, and to this end I've downloaded DAZ Studio onto my computer to see how well it works as an artist's reference tool.  This is, predictably, throwing up the kind of technical issues that put me off 3D in the first place.  The latest version of DAZ Studio is too big to download.  I've installed an older version (4-point-something) but when I try to load Poser figures (my own or other people's) the program complains about not being able to find the correct geometry files and gives up.  When I try importing my own models as Wavefront files, the textures won't load properly.  Basically, I'm getting distracted.

WIP - Dinosaurs

This picture is meant to illustrate the verse "Better a dry crust with peace and quiet than a house full of feasting, with strife" from Proverbs 17:1.  I've already illustrated this verse once using my little hairy bipedal characters (for which I still have to think of a name!) but have lately found myself producing multiple interpretations of the same Bible verse.

This probably wouldn't take long to colour in using Paint Shop, but I'm toying with the idea of using Bryce for the background, combining 2D and 3D.  The problem with that is that, while it looks quite nice, it requires a certain amount of fiddling about, which turns an hour's work into several hours' work.

WIP - Big Bad Wolf

This is one of those pictures that I've started and then got no further with.  It's meant to be illustrating the verse from 1 Corinthians: "So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!"  However, I'm not sure the fan looks big enough to blow down that straw house, or whether the wolf should be holding a snow blower instead.  Then again, if I put a snow blower in there, would it be obvious to everyone that that is what it is?
This is a good case of overthinking the problem.

Random doodles

Over the past year I've been doing a lot of pencil drawing, using coloured pencils rather than traditional lead pencils (as coloured pencils put up more resistance on the paper and are therefore easier to control).  A lot of my pictures are figurative, portraits of work colleagues, family, friends, and anyone who will sit still for long enough.  I've also been going out a lot and drawing sculptures in public places such as museums (again, because sculptures stay still).  London is a great place for doing that sort of thing.
I've been using the same medium for drawing cartoons and putting silly ideas on paper.  Because coloured pencil doesn't rub out, I then have to trace the original drawing when producing an inked and coloured version.
The process of doing "finished" work remains as slow as ever.

Back from the dead... again!

Well, it has been a busy few months!  I've set up my own website at: http://simonfaiers.wix.com/simonsbrain, I've joined Instagram, and I've finally managed to bash the first chapter of my "Razorback" story into a completed form.
The website is broken down into separate sections for cartoons, 3D work, "Razorback" (from which the first chapter of the story can be downloaded) and "Random Doodles" (which encompasses anything that isn't "finished work" - sketches of people, silly cartoons that I couldn't be bothered to draw up properly, and works in progress).I've been doing a lot of pencil drawings, sketching outside, or drawing people that I know, and that has been taking up most of my spare time.  The pencil drawings, and any completed cartoons, are added to the website and also uploaded to Twitter, from which they also appear on my Facebook page.  At present, nobody is really looking at my website (predictably!) so social media is the only way to get these pictures seen.  The 3D work has fallen by the wayside, although I have got around to uploading some of my models onto Renderosity.  This in particular has been quite nerve-wracking, a bit like sending your child away to school.  Suddenly they're out of your hands and in the "real world".

One very nice discovery of a few months ago was that somebody had come across my Lego Rom picture and put it on their blog:
http://romspaceknightart.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/when-goofy-rom-art-deosnt-suck.html.

Back from the dead...

...or very nearly so, anyway. Once again I return after a lengthy absence, resolved to try and make the blogging more consistent from now on. So now the digital art and the cartooning has taken a back seat while I embrace the humble pencil once more. Just recently I've been doing a lot of doodling, mostly on spare scraps of paper in idle moments, and the results have been finding their way on to Facebook, where they've met with some fairly positive responses. I'm now looking at options for displaying my old and new pictures online, and have come up with several options:

1. Produce a Facebook page specifically for my art. I've started one but am already confused by the options. Should this be an "artist page" or a "business page"? Why don't they give you an option to just make a "page"?  Anyway, the page is at: https://www.facebook.com/#!/siscreativestuff
2. Build a website. I've started building one on Wordpress, having had prior experience while volunteering for the church in Leeds, but am hitting an obstacle in the form of the "gallery widget", which has serious issues displaying images on some browsers. Which won't do at all. The site, still in its' under-construction state is located at: http://simonfaiers.wordpress.com/
3.  Flickr. I've started a new photostream and uploaded a lot of pictures onto it, only to discover that there is no (obvious) way to customise the order in which the pictures are displayed. At present all the newest images are on page 5.  The photostream is located (I think!) at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/123743381@N05/
4. Just continue with this blog.

Okay, I've just found out how to change the "date uploaded" of pictures in Flickr.  Unfortunately, it can only be done one picture at a time, so this could take a while...

A couple of weird flying things

I've temporarily given up on Blender and have re-installed Poser 6 on my computer.  (If it ain't broke, why fix it, after all?)